Scratching the surface
“Now, if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it….” Sonnet 71 is traditionally understood as defining the zenith—or the nadir—of the recklessly selfless path Shakespeare’s speaker charts throughout the cycle. Here he importunes the beloved to forget him when he’s gone, warning that their association will only cause him trouble with the “wise world” (it had also been “vile”) which, he fears, will “mock you with me when I’m gone.” Many critics have found what Helen Vendler terms the “overmastering passion” of the sonnets here edging into hyperbole, too fierce and self-consuming.
But there is another trope being played here; Shakespeare is also ruminating on the durability of writing and the evanescence of the lifeworld.
The connections between writing and death are ancient and powerful. In myth the Greeks received the alphabet from the Phoenician prince Cadmus, reputed founder of Thebes in the Mycenaean age. According to myth, Cadmus’s army was slaughtered by a dragon; Cadmus slayed the dragon, and following Athena’s instructions, sowed its teeth in a field. From them sprang up a troop of armed men to replace the lost army. The mythical formulation linked those dragon’s teeth and the letters of the alphabet—who as zombie-like drones serve the spirit of language tirelessly and with perfect skill.
Socrates would draw the connection between writing and the dead, describing letters as dead forms that cannot speak their own words, but only endlessly repeat those of their authors. And in China, the literate understood the connection writing granted them with the dead—the ancestors—to be intimate and profound, even to the point of describing letters (which in ancient China were first inscribed on bones) as skeletons of the departed.
Of course, Shakespeare isn’t riffing on Chinese notions of death and letters. But he is recognizing the powerful—the uncanny—power over death of the medium he mastered. His speaker’s self-abnegation is forcible; not only does he wish his existence to be forgotten, but that all connection with his written traces to be erased. Writing endures; true erasure is a task only the mind and heart may accomplish. Sonnet 71 damns the speaker to oblivion—or rather to occlusion, but not utter perdition. For the poem shall live. The beloved—who even now spurns the graying speaker—may moan in his absence. It’s that moan which the wise world shall judge; the poem will endure unblemished.
Writing is durable in its evanescence. This is one of the observations made by John Donne, who follows Shakespeare in limning writing’s capacity for documenting lives beyond their compass. His is a rich and strange valediction, for in scratching his name in his beloved’s window, he leavess a palimpsest which shall mark and transform every subsequent relation. Memory in Donne’s poem, like writing, is a kind of enduring ephemerality. His diamond-etched name give firmness to glass by troubling its transparency. Thinking of the fickle reflectivity of clear glass, he imagines his beloved seeing her own visage complicated by the presence of his name: “Here you see me, and I am you.” Beyond existential consideration, however, Donne wishes her simply to remember—and as with the ancient Chinese, the “ruinous anatomy” of his “ragged and bony name” serves as a literate memento mori.
But for Donne, writing’s power outstrips mere reminder; lodged in his beloved’s consciousness, the written name becomes transubstantial. “Emparadised” in her, the written characters are like to the scattered bits of his remains which rapture will “recompact” when the dead awaken at the end of all things. The written name forces open the window and refenstrates the soul, which like a swallow or a memory returns with the seasons. And when it flies again, the written name will stand in its stead to efface the new lover’s name, an a priori correction: “So, in forgetting thou rememb’rest right, / And unaware to me shalt write.”
